Eats and Reads By Nicole

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It was a busy weekend- cleaning the house, doing the laundry, making dinners and using social media to get the files to bring unique professional development to our library from Laura Fleming, pioneering librarian author of Worlds of Making: Best Practices for Establishing a Makerspace in Your School. I learned all about Laura’s library from her principal, Eric Sheninger, at our regional CNY SLS Conference last week.

Since I heard her story, I have taken baby steps to begin planning a makerspace in our high school library. The kids want a 3-D printer. I want a more focused space in our library where the kids are learning by playing games and doing. I want them to do more, and learn more, by having fun. I’d like to improve their thinking by allowing games, experiments, coding activities, and hands-on projects to happen.

The next objective I have is to not only maintain this blog, but to advance a brand for our library on its Facebook page, and a blog for the school community. I’m hoping to get our students to brainstorm and perhaps given them ownership of our online content.

Laura and Eric also inspired my desire to try open badging professional development to train teachers about Web 2.0, websites and databases we have so they can integrate them into their curriculum. Laura GAVE me her files. I know this might be complicated, but I’m hoping with some support that I can have a platform where teachers may go and try out the cool tools I get exposed to at my conferences, the databases and websites we purchase in our district, and that it will motivate ongoing learning and further collaboration. We will see how it goes, but the only route to success is to suffer failure. I’m willing to take the risk, and I wasn’t before.

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Life can be stressful, and I am a worrier. I’m trying very hard to make myself think positive and act proactively in every situation, every day. I have to learn to hit the delete button in my head, to live in the moment, and do what I can to not get in the way of others doing the same.

I’m resolved to give our library new life once again by getting our maker lab in place, and adding a more easy social atmosphere by adding strategy board games or hands on games into our space. It all starts now, have to stay on track, and be positive.

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I’m keeping my promise to do a blog post every day, even though this Friday has been filled with tasks like filling the color printer with waste toner cartridges that can’t be found, ordering toner, and revamping a perfectly great activity because the I Pad app was erased – the app is no longer available in the store. Such is the life of the busy librarian – putting out copier fires, and also planning new activities. Fortunately, the activity planned is to teach students about manifest destiny and Westward Expansion. Being a pioneer or a Native American wasn’t easy, and so, it has reminded me that I have to keep my promises, work hard and just do.

I resolved to solve the puzzle of how to recreate the activity we lost. In doing so, I discovered many excellent documents, streaming digital video clips, as well as photographs that can retell the story of the movement of those adventurous Americans who decided to expand to the West, as well as the hardships of the Native Americans they displaced. I have decided that we will upload the clips, documents and photographs to our Schoology platform. I found these clips on our SNAP Smart Media digital catalog, provided by our BOCES School Library System. I would also like to use Socrative or a Google Doc as our assessment tool for questioning, but we will see what the teacher wants to do to make the assessment of knowledge more interactive.

For now, I am happy that I have successfully found some interesting resources to engage our students. Fingers crossed that I do not run out of any toner in the copy machine. Happy Friday, everyone!

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We learned about this very cool resource at the CNY SLS Conference where you can spell out any words using images from flickr. It is called Spell With Flickr, created by Erik Kastner, and I am hoping to use this resource with my U.S. History students as they will be creating their alphabet books online as digital books.

I plan on having students use graphic design sites (Tackk, Canva and Recite) suggested at this conference, and (s)mash or them with Flipsnack to create their own alphabet books. I’d like to catalog their books in our catalog in the library for future readers. I’m so excited that I have found a creative way for this teacher to continue to do this project with her students. Whether we are mashing or smashing these tools, I’m pretty sure they will make a splash.

I was amazed and inspired by Shannon McClintock Miller. I am going to try to make it a habit to post once a day, from now on, about my ideas and plans for curriculum and teachers. My whole goal is to stop being lazy about blogging. and show what I am DOING to promote awesome learning experiences in our school that engage our students .

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The cover of See You at Harry’s by Jo Knowles features a just-eaten hot fudge sundae glass with two spoons inside. See You at Harry’s left me feeling the simple satisfaction of just having read a perfectly sweet and intimate novel of empathy and love.

Our narrator is 12 year-old Fern, but like all children this age she is more complicated than you would think. She is named, yes, for the character in Charlotte’s Web and she lets us know who all of her siblings are also named after famous literary characters (Sara, Holden and Charlie). Her mother explains her name:

“Because Fern cares, ” she said. “From the moment you were born, I could tell you had a special soul. I knew you’d be a good friend. A hero.”

Did you feel that tug on your heartstrings? Yes, this is the special magic that is held in this novel.